The Nutter Equation

Everybody's mad at the mayor. Maybe that's the best thing he's got going for him.

by Isaiah Thompson

Neal Santos

Mayor Michael Nutter has "managed to upset just about everybody in the city!" — as the mayor himself admitted to Philadelphia's Chamber of Commerce last week. It was a laugh line — all the more funny, if that's the word, because the Chamber of Commerce is mad at him, too. Everybody is.

It's a far cry from Nutter's first day in office, when Philly residents arrived at City Hall by the thousands to welcome their new mayor, the line to see him winding around the building like a great human wreath.

Those were the days. The cry of "change!" was in the air, and Nutter's election seemed to mark the end of things many people wanted ended: divisive racial politics (Nutter won a wildly unprecedented 37 percent of the white Democratic vote) and machine rule (ward leaders had backed Congressman Bob Brady). Nutter was elected instead by a popular potpourri of black professionals, white liberals, small-business owners, corporate CEOs, gays, yuppies, urbanite intellectuals, good-government and tax reformers and anti-casino activists. Hope was alive and expectations were high — too high, maybe.

Three years later, on the eve of the city's primaries, Nutter finds himself something of a loner.

He's isolated himself politically by criticizing bastions of patronage, alienating members of City Council and implementing reforms that irk ward leaders. And of all those diverse groups that helped elect him, Nutter has in some way or another ticked off each one. His standing among black voters seems to have dropped; liberals have found him too conservative, conservatives too liberal; he's recently drawn the ire of the gay community; and he's betrayed, as they see it, the anti-casino movement.

And yet he's looking all but unbeatable right now. Just weeks until primary petitions must be filed, Nutter faces just one challenger so far, Milton Street, whom he expects to beat handily. Even Nutter's critics grudgingly concede that the mayor is poised to cruise into re-election with that cool, Nutterly sangfroid that drives them so crazy.

What's to explain this?

Part of the answer is that for all his perceived failures, Nutter can also point to a number of successes — unglamorous, often, but substantive. The case that can be made for the Nutter administration is real; it's just not very sexy. But it's also this: The very decisions that have angered one interest usually won him back the respect, grudging or not, of another. In pissing off virtually every opposing interest in town, he's also given just enough to each to deter outright rebellion from any of them. Call it the Nutter equation.

Whether that makes him a great mayor is another question — one that's maybe yet to be answered. Even if he wins re-election, Nutter's path forward isn't obvious. Then again, neither is he. And for every easy criticism of the mayor, there's a more complicated reality.

Neal Santos

"He doesn't get it."

If the outpouring on the mayor's first day was the first defining episode of his administration, the Great Library Debacle of 2008 was perhaps its second.

In the wake of a sudden, massive budget shortfall, Nutter announced in November 2008 his plan to permanently shutter 11 city libraries. Philadelphia residents rose up and demanded the mayor back down. He would not. A pro-library coalition sued the city, winning a court injunction. Nutter threatened to appeal, but then changed tack, dropping the appeal and leaving all 11 libraries open.

Despite the outcome, the episode painted a new picture of the mayor in a lot of residents' minds. He went from Obama-esque reformer to tone-deaf technocrat. But this image obscured a larger point: Overall, Nutter's answer to the recession was to preserve the city services that residents value.

"Every mayor had to deal with the economy. [Nutter's] decision was to keep most services intact," sums up It's Our Money reporter Ben Waxman. "And it's funny because that was kind of a surprise."

Nutter, after all, had run on the promise of restructuring government. Even as many residents saw the library debacle as a sign that the mayor didn't care about neighborhoods, business and small-government types saw the mayor's larger plan, to keep government more or less intact, as exactly the opposite: a betrayal.

"The upper echelon, they don't go to libraries. They don't use rec centers," Waxman points out. "They look at the last couple years and say, 'What did Michael Nutter do? He didn't do anything!' But then they put their trash out and it gets collected. They walk around Center City and there's cop cars."

At the same time, Nutter stopped short of billing himself a populist neighborhoods hero. He declined to raise the business and wage taxes so hated by business advocates, and instead balanced the budget with sales and property tax hikes — re-infuriating the very progressives who'd demanded that services not be cut in the first place. It was anger all around, you might say. But it worked.

"He's accomplished nothing."

"That lame 311 system" pretty much sums up what Inquirer columnist Monica Yant Kinney had to say in a recent piece about the mayor's accomplishments thus far. That, and "the dreaded D-word": disappointment.

She was largely referencing criticism levied by former mayor John Street, who, in a November 2010 interview with Philadelphia magazine, said that 311 "has failed" and that "on the things that matter, Mayor Nutter has crippled the city."

Both were using 311, the service hot line that was Nutter's baby, to make a larger point about the mayor: that his bureaucratic accomplishments haven't added up to much. "This is about the future of the city," Street elaborated. "It's about neighborhoods and basic services. It's about the functionality and management of government."

Nutter has fallen short in some of his own biggest goals, so far: ethics reform and crime reduction. The mayor promised to reduce murders by 30 to 50 percent within three to five years. Last year, they were down only 22 percent. So far this year, murders are up. And while the mayor recently announced new ethics rules, he's been unable to get other elected bodies, like Council, to do the same.

Yet the very example used by Street and Kinney to illustrate the mayor's utter ineffectiveness — 311 — might actually make a decent case for the opposite point. A Pew study last March found Philly's 311 service cheaper than similar programs in other cities and fairly popular: 68 percent of people who had called the hot line said they had been satisfied with the information they got. A few months ago, City Paper discovered that the city's 311 call center had established a presence on seeclickfix.com, a website that allows residents to report concerns online and track their complaints.

"It's far better than what we had, which was to call the streets department and get an answering machine, which is full, or address your city councilperson," acknowledges John Boyle of the Philadelphia Bike Coalition, who holds the honor of being the site's third-most-active user (Philly311 is the first).

It's this kind of small, unglamorous innovation that hasn't won the mayor much press, but that, members of his administration argue passionately, represents one of the most radical things the mayor's trying to do: make the city's sprawling bureaucracy more accessible to regular people and take politics out of the equation of city services.

It's not the only example. The city is engaged, for example, in a massive overhaul of its zoning code. Boring stuff? Sure. But right now, the city's zoning code means that to get anything done, developers and businesses often need zoning variances — which means they need to go through political channels like City Council. The Philadelphia Planning Commission has gone from a bureaucratic backwater to an actual functioning planning agency, and just released a master plan for the city.

The Department of Licenses & Inspections (L&I) has started to look, well, professional. Three years ago, there existed, amazingly, no standard for how many times an inspector would visit the site of a complaint before a violator was taken to court. Now L&I performs three visits and then takes a property to court. The time it takes L&I to seal vacant buildings has gone from eight to ten months to 10 days. The waiting time at the L&I's service counter has been cut in half.

When the Nutter administration took over the city's Redevelopment Authority, the department was riddled with bad bookkeeping and unaccounted-for money — good ingredients for corruption. Under the leadership of former director Terry Gillen, appointed by Nutter in 2008 to overhaul the agency, many land grants were halted; the agency's finances were reviewed; and stricter checks were instituted for the signing-off of new deals.

"[Gillen] was the first one to end some of the sweetheart deals," argues real estate developer Ken Weinstein. "You bring in people like that, and good things are going to happen."

This, say sources within the administration, is perhaps Nutter's greatest and least-known legacy so far: He's hired some good managers, and they're making a difference.

For people demanding nothing less than the restructuring of government, however, these accomplishments simply aren't what the mayor promised.

"He was going to be the reformer. He was going to clean up City Hall," says one longtime political observer. "But he became essentially a super-managing director. And a ribbon-cutter."

"The Nutter administration can proudly point to many, many small improvements," concedes former city controller and tax-reform activist Brett Mandel, who says he was excited when Nutter was elected mayor. "But we're not grading on a curve here. ... We were promised a big renaissance — we didn't stand in line to shake hands with the guy who was going to be a little bit better."

Some, though, take the opposite view. As one administration source put it, "Things are happening on the ground despite a shitty economy. ... Don't let perfect be the enemy of good."

"He won't make friends."

"[Nutter] has no allies on Council. He doesn't have one reliable vote," is how one political insider characterizes the mayor's relationship with Philadelphia's City Council. And there's a lot of truth to this.

Nutter has been unable to bring a simple majority of nine Council members on board with virtually any of the big-ticket items he's brought before the body. Recently, he's lost the votes even of former stalwart allies. In his effort last year to pass a controversial tax on sweetened beverages as part of the city's budget, Nutter actually managed to lose votes. According to several sources, Nutter began the debate just one or two votes short of reaching his goal. By the end, that gap had widened from a good bet to no dice.

"He has to develop a style of, 'Let me talk to you first before I bring you this bill,'" says Councilwoman and Democratic Majority Leader Marian B. Tasco — expressing politely what other Council members and staffers have told CP more bluntly over the past year: that the mayor tends to hole up within his own administration, declining to share credit, defer to or consult with Council members before unveiling plans, or give them enough opportunity to claim their own victories.

"He deserves to be re-elected and will be re-elected," says at-large Councilman Jim Kenney, a personal friend and (usually) one of Nutter's few reliable allies. "But this is not running a factory. Politics is a profession, and there's an art to it. You can be honest and transparent and whatever else you want, and still do politics. Because that's what makes things move."

The consequences of Nutter's inability to win over Council have been serious: The last two years' budgets wound up being led not by Nutter but by a nervous Council — so nervous that when it decided to reject the mayor's beverage tax, it proposed instead a dollar-store-esque property tax increase of 9.9 percent, instead of the 12.1 percent needed to make up the difference, leaving Nutter to fill a $20 million hole.

So the mayor should be more political — play the game better, right? And yet much of the criticism of Nutter has been exactly the opposite, that he's too worried about political sensitivities to take a hard line. One of the biggest criticisms, in fact, is that ...

"He won't fight."

First, there's the city's long-put-off negotiations with its two municipal unions. Most observers note that, after declining to appeal a damaging arbitration award to the police union and giving the striking Transport Workers Union most of what they wanted, the city won't be able to wrangle much out of them, especially as city revenues finally begin to improve.

Then there's the battle to make city government less prone to corruption. A recent Daily News article featured good-government advocates like the Committee of Seventy opining that Nutter had fallen short in ethics reforms by not demanding that elected officials like Council adopt ethics rules like those on gifts and nepotism his own administration recently put into effect. Indeed, Nutter responded to Daily News questions by saying only, "You'll have to ask Council about that."

Of course, he's right: The mayor can't force Council to adopt new ethics rules. Why not at least make a stink, then? Maybe the mayor's still stuck on the accusation that he's alienated Council.

Nutter faces similar criticisms — and similar conundrums — over various other battles he's waded into and then tip-toed back out of. He abolished the Clerk of Quarter Sessions, one of Philly's four independently elected "row offices," whose elimination good-government groups have called for. But he said little about another, highly political row office, the City Commissioners, when the Board of Ethics found that Renee Tartaglione, daughter of City Commissioner Marge Tartaglione, had violated ethics rules shortly after she resigned.

Nutter's taken some heat over saying little about the recent Philadelphia Housing Authority scandals. But defenders of the mayor rebut that he has little power over the agency (especially since one of the two mayor's "appointees" to the board is John Street, who appointed himself). "People wanted Michael to pick a street fight with John Street," says one city source with whom CP spoke. "I'm glad Mayor Nutter had the grace and intelligence not to get into the gutter."

The mayor did move to dismantle the famously broken Board of Revision of Taxes (only to have that measure overturned by the state supreme court) and appointed the city's first-ever independent, professional property assessor to re-evaluate Philly's wildly disparate property taxes. But his administration, critics say, has been reluctant to move quickly in reassessing those properties. Administration members argue that it's simply a huge, huge task — the BRT's data has been bad for decades.

Critics say it's a lack of courage. "They're politicians, and they know that if they get it wrong in just 1 percent of the cases, that means 5,000 people are going to be screaming," says Mandel, the former city controller.

It's like a lot of the problems the mayor faces: Look at it one way, and you might see Nutter letting himself get trapped by competing interests, backing down from major change and losing himself instead in the details of incremental progress. Look at it another way, and you might see incremental progress as the most radical thing to happen to Philly in years.

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)